At the start of the month, self-described “police whistleblower” Jon Wedger announced a new allegation against former Prime Minister Ted Heath:

We are going live this morning. With former BBC ITV reporter @BreesAnna interviewing a man claiming to have been sexually abused by Former prime minister Sir Edward Heath, and launching his book

The accuser in this instance is one Michael Tarraga (var. Mike Tarraga), who says that he was brought to Heath while he was a child in care. According to his account, as given in an interview with Brees:

Uncle Teddy was a sailor. A politician sailor. I didn’t know anything about him. I was taken one afternoon [from school]… to a place called Pin Mill, which was a little sailing place in Suffolk I think it was, or Essex. And [I] went there, and there was a silver-haired man, a portly chap, and another chap who I was told was a doctor. And I was with another boy, we were told to swim naked, which we did, or in our underwear, which we did also, and spent an interesting afternoon in a foc’sle cabin with who I discovered was called Ted Heath, who was a very prominent sailor. That’s all I knew. I knew nothing else. And it clocked years later, “this Prime Minister played with me”. That’s what I thought. I thought no-one, nobody in their right senses is going to believe me. And I was right. Nobody did believe me.

In another video, Brees explains that this was in 1962, when Tarraga was 13 years old.

Tarraga has had a difficult life, which he has written about in a 2017 self-published memoir titled The Successful Failure: The Life of an Uncouth Lout. However, under the guidance of Wedger and Brees, the book has now been re-published as Meat Rack Boy, in reference to the notorious rent-boy scene that used to exist in the vicinity of Piccadilly Circus in central London. This new edition includes the Heath story: as Brees says, “what we’ve done with the book is put a little bit more detail in […]. We’ve also talked about the incident with Edward Heath”.

Wedger previously interviewed Tarraga last month, and according to Brees Heath’s name came up afterwards: “It was Jon Wedger was talking to you after, you know, off-camera, and you just said ‘yeah, I saw him. He was called Uncle Teddy'”. In other words, Heath’s name only came up because Wedger mentioned him first – and Tarraga would have known what Wedger wanted to hear. The name “Uncle Teddy” is reminiscent of “Uncle Eddie”, which was the name provided by another Heath accuser, James Reeves – whom Wedger interviewed last September. Like Tarraga, Reeves was also raised and abused in care during the 1950s and 1960s, but details in his “VIP” allegations against Heath and others are contradicted by the historical record.

As with Reeves, Tarraga’s story about Heath is impossible. I have no idea what happened to him at Pin Mill, but Heath’s involvement can be ruled out. First, Heath did not take up sailing until 1966, and it took a bit of time after that before he became a “prominent” sailor. John Campbell’s biography of Heath makes this clear (pages 249-250):

Unlike music, which had been his passion from boyhood, Heath only took up sailing in middle age, a few weeks before his fiftieth birthday when he was already in the full glare of media attention as Leader of the Opposition… He began in the smallest possible way, taking lessons from an instructor whose kiosk happened to catch his attention on Broadstairs jetty in the summer of 1966. Up to that time he had done no more than mess around in a dinghy on holiday with the Seligmans in Brittany in the 1950s and at Villefranche the previous summer. In his book Sailing Heath claims that sat a boy he had always been fascinated by boats and the sea, but could never afford to do anything about it. (1)

Second, someone who has researched Heath’s movements in 1962 writes that “Heath was out of UK for all but 7 days late June-mid Sept 1962. Those 7 days accounted for. He was negotiating UK entry to Common Market so well covered in media.”

It is also unclear why Tarraga did not go public in 2015, during a period when various lurid claims about Heath were being published in the media, and there was even a high-profile police trawling investigation. Rather than not being believed, his story would have been lapped up uncritically.

It is not pleasant to have to contradict an abuse survivor who is currently enjoying some well-deserved validation and sympathy over a horrendous childhood – one obviously doesn’t want to pain a vulnerable adult, and to appear to have done so can have uncomfortable consequences on social media. However, no-one alive or dead should be subjected to reputational destruction based on claims that are untrue, and in this instance the evidence exonerating Heath is conclusive.

There is also a wider public interest here – false claims about “VIP abuse” not only muddy the waters for anyone who has a genuine allegation; as with the American “QAnon” conspiracy theory (which Brees has endorsed), stories about “elite paedophiles” are also weaponised by fringe political groups (and Wedger has addressed at least one such group).

Whatever way Tarraga was coaxed into re-remembering his past so that it that contradicts known facts, Wedger and Brees have exploited and humiliated him for their own ends, and this cannot pass without comment.

Footnote

1. A photo of Heath “messing around” in a rowing boat with his godson Lincoln Seligman on holiday in France in 1965 was published by the journalist Mark Watts in 2017. Watts had been led to believe that it was “taken in Jersey in 1972”, and Seligman, viewed from the rear, was not identified. The implication was that this was photographic evidence of Heath’s supposed association with teenage boys on the island, in particular from the Haut de la Garenne children’s care home. Although Watts had been misled, and he was afterwards censured by IMPRESS over the error, he has never explained where this false “Jersey” attribution came from.

15 Responses

It is disingenuous to suggest that Edward Heath was only ‘aboard’ after he bought his first boat. Heath was always messing about in boats, other peoples boats.

I met several men in the 1980s who were surprised to see one of the men who took them nude swimming, as teenagers, on board boats, in the 1960s/70s on the Norfolk Broads, had become PM.

Wedger would latch onto Heath if you are selling a book, but Tarraga had been abused badly, and as he said, there was no abuse, as he understood it, from Heath, just nude swimming and drying him with a towel, which was considered ‘normal’ in those days.

Pin Mill does ring a bell, as officers from the nearby Boys Naval Base HMS Ganges used to take 15 and 16-year-olds there for sailing and nude swimming.

To suggest that Heath had no sexual feelings towards any human being is a bit far fetched. He was probably very repressed, and in gay parlance, ‘uncles’ did not have sex, just voyeurism and non-sexual touching.

Well-known gay uncles were Baden Powel, Montgomery, Tuke, George Wheatley Cobb (who used to have both Tuke and Baden Powel onboard his ship), to name but a few.

Brian Coleman, the Conservative Party London Assembly member for Barnet and Camden, claimed in 2007 that Heath, in order to protect his career, had stopped cottaging in the 1950s.

Coleman said it was “common knowledge” among Conservatives that Heath had been given a stern warning by police when he underwent background checks for the post of Privy Councillor.

Police said that if Heath were still alive they would have interviewed him under caution in relation to seven out of the 42 allegations

You have done some nifty footwork with bizarre claims that because some blokes took boys nude swimming that ergo the claims about Ted Heath must have some credence.
I’d put as much faith in those claims as the one where you say “Police said that if Heath were still alive they would have interviewed him under caution in relation to seven out of the 42 allegations” when you neglected to say it was the disgraced and discredited Chief Constable Mike Veale who made that claim while presenting no evidence to the public for that claim. Veale of course is pals with Jon Wedger the alleged “whistle blower” who is yet to blow his whistle on anything.

It’s true that Coleman claimed that Heath had been warned to stop cottaging. However, no-one has come forward to testify to Coleman’s claims. It sounds to me like pub gossip. And gays, like us straights, are not averse to a bit of pub gossip, let’s face it.

To add, of course even if Heath HAD been cottaging, that is not evidence of any child abuse per se, as the majority of those who engaged in the practice were looking for gay sex with consenting adults. Some engaged in the practice long after gay sex had been legalised due to being driven to thrill-seeking behaviour, George Michael being a classic example.

Coleman said it was “common knowledge” among Conservatives that Heath had been given a stern warning by police when he underwent background checks for the post of Privy Councillor. no one contradicted that?

You are saying that Tory politicians were telling lies, detectives were telling lies, as well as complainants?

Pin mill may be a memorable name, but how did Tarraga, or Wedger come up with it? Very few people would know unless they lived there, had been a Ganges Boy, had been to one of the two private boarding schools near there, Royal Hospital School, or Woolverstone Hall school?

You know it’s quite depressing the way unproved claims are bandied about and used in any way the promoter desires to try and prove a claim based on no evidence.

On one hand you claim I ” should consider being a politician” implying the usual meme that politicians either avoid answers or tell fibs yet on the other you simply accept that a political figure like Coleman is telling the truth (or even actually said what you claim).

One thing we do know is that powerful men like Ted Heath had serious enemies and usually in politics your worst enemies are among your comrades as Harvey Proctor has been fond of saying publicly so many times that he & Heath loathed each other and the very notion of them being in the same room (to abuse) is fantasy.

There is no proof that Coleman is being truthful but I’ve been around a long time and during the Heath PMship talk was always common that “Heath is queer” and in fact most unmarried men over 30 in that era were considered strange and every Broadway, West End star and Hollywood male movie star was considered a “poofter” no matter what their marital status was along with every pop star on the planet.

It’s how people talk but there is one solid fact that cannot be disputed: no-one actually knows what Ted Heath’s sexuality was. Not one single person, male or female has come forward to claim a sexual relationship (apart from bogus claims). Work colleagues such as other Tory figures (and Labour) are no different to a bunch of gossips in the local pub and make all sorts of claims like Coleman has while not presenting a single piece of evidence.

The “icing on the cake in your post is “You are saying that Tory politicians were telling lies, detectives were telling lies, as well as complainants?”

Complainants lie (as the convicted jailed child rapist who accused Heath did as proved), police routinely lie and as for Tory politicians..
With thoughts like yours who needs a trial- straight to jail upon accusation.

And you make an utterly outrageous claim which in fact in itself actually could prove the oppose to what you undoubtedly are attempting to claim with your “no one has contradicted that” .
No-one possibly contradicted that because it wasn’t true and they had no knowledge of what Coleman was talking about.

[…] Tarraga, could’ve quite easily have written about Heath in the previous edition of his “misery memoirs” – he didn’t. Others such as Richard Bartholomew have debunked some of Tarraga’s specific claims regarding Heath – notably in this link. […]

The Private Eye piece adds even more credence to Tarraga’s claims. He was given ‘half a crown to go to Pin Mill, which is the return price of the ferry from Harwich to Shotley Gate.

We know that Heath did not just take up sailing late in life, he was always sailing on other peoples boats. So as well as the Norfolk Broads, he could well have been sailing at Pin Mill, and would have found out about it through his Naval friends in government.

That leads us to another possibility, he he carried on sailing there, maybe he knew something about the ‘Suitcase murder’ still unsolved 50 years on.

The dismembered body of a teenage boy was discovered in two suitcases at Tattingstone, very near Pin Mill in January 1967.

[…] were reminded of this a couple of days ago when we read that Private Eye had followed up on last month’s coverage of Anna Brees, ex-BBC journo turned PR flack to the conspiracy set, most notably Jon […]

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